False accusations, prosecutorial zealots, false convictions, prison terms for crimes that never happened

[Tis_Bearself]

My hope would be that the people who are suddenly worried about being exposed to wrongful sexual allegations are able to understand better where other groups and communities are often more exposed to more serious issues of the application of justice.

Serious question here, not trying to start a flame war with you either, but why do people always jump to conclusions that those who mention false allegations, or otherwise do not immediately take the side of an alleged victim, are ignorant of general issues of the application of justice?

 

[PJH_74]

Serious question here, not trying to start a flame war with you either, but why do people always jump to conclusions that those who mention false allegations, or otherwise do not immediately take the side of an alleged victim, are ignorant of general issues of the application of justice?

Because I’ve been around for a while. Look, there are definitely people who can empathize. But there is also very substantial resistance to a number of very public movements that have had little public sympathy or have received substantial deflection. I consider these issues to raise substantially bigger questions about society than this one. Again, I choose not to name them because of this. I’m not saying wrongful accusations for sexual abuse are not worth anyone’s time and care but I’m dismayed at the proportion of it given to it.

 

[Tis_Bearself]

Most of the people I bother to discuss this issue with are involved somehow in law or in the justice system because they are aware of all these false memory and injustice issues and most of them can discuss without getting emotional and starting to hurl insults. When I try to discuss with anyone outside that group I usually get yelled at and called a racist or an evil Trump supporter or a supporter of rapists or all kinds of crap. It’s pointless for me to try to explain that I actually have some background in it because people don’t want to have a logical discussion, they seemingly just want to be angry. I went through that last week several times with friends and Kavanaugh. I wish people were more able to actually have a logical discussion and not make assumptions, as a lot of my friends don’t know my life history or my background and I don’t like to advertise it because I shouldn’t have to.

 

[glorybe]

Most of the people I bother to discuss this issue with are involved somehow in law or in the justice system because they are aware of all these false memory and injustice issues and most of them can discuss without getting emotional and starting to hurl insults.

Does my being married to a cop for 40 years count?

 

[PJH_74]

Most of the people I bother to discuss this issue with are involved somehow in law or in the justice system because they are aware of all these false memory and injustice issues and most of them can discuss without getting emotional and starting to hurl insults.
…

I wish people were more able to actually have a logical discussion and not make assumptions, as a lot of my friends don’t know my life history or my background and I don’t like to advertise it because I shouldn’t have to.

Hopefully you can understand that I’m trying to be logical with my response and again I say this with respect. I think part of the response you are getting is that you have a tendency to value what you perceive as logic for an item that is a very emotional experience for many. Now, you may not really be discounting the experience these people have had, but this response is exactly why many such incidents don’t go reported. I’ve been through it myself and I can tell you such a response is not helpful.

 

[PetraG]

Are you going to talk about the other crimes people are wrongly convicted of? The percentage of people executed or on death row that have been exonerated? Or that poor people are more likely to be jailed because of poor representation. Or that black men are 700% and Hispanic men are 300% more likely to be imprisoned than white men, there is no way those numbers are natural. If you are really concerned about wrongful convictions you have to eat all the cherries on the tree, not just the ones you pick.

The cases recounted in Dorothy Rabinowitz’s book are not about marginalized defendants. A doctor, a preschool teacher, a cop, an entire family who operated a daycare. The only way in which they were marginalized was by false accusations, fake ‘experts,’ prosecutorial zealots, coercive interrogations, fabricated stories, cherry picked evidence, suppression of exculpatory evidence, and mass hysteria in the public and in the media.

Another egregious example of false convictions were the “The Norfolk Four.” Four sailors from whom false confessions were extracted for a crime they did not commit. They were so unaware of the facts of the crime that their “confessions” did not make sense and had to be continually corrected by the detectives to correspond with the facts of the crime. Why would anyone confess to a horrible crime they did not commit? They were told that if they did not confess they would receive the death penalty but if they produced a confession they would only get life in prison. Sometime later a lone individual who actually did commit the crime did confess to it and his confession matched the details of the case.

Obviously another famous example is the Central Park Five case, obviously: two 14 year olds, two 15 year olds and a 16 year old, by the way. That was an extreme miscarriage of justice, to say the least.

Obviously, that is not a crime that never happened. I would guess that it is much easier to get a false conviction for a horrible crime that was undeniably committed by someone. Jurors want justice when they know there has been a victim. If they can doubt there was a crime, that is a different matter.

I don’t think anyone disagrees that it is extremely rare for someone to honestly believe they were raped or assaulted when they weren’t, not unless they are very suggestible for some reason (like if they are a child). The problem comes when a victim decides they know who assaulted them and the victim is mistaken. (In the case of children, it is apparently not that uncommon for a child to accuse someone other than the real assailant because the child is conflicted about accusing the real perpetrator when that person ought to be well-liked or trusted. These children seem to be very credible witnesses, because they can describe a crime that actually took place with internally-consistent details that most children couldn’t pull from their imaginations.)

 

[ascetic]

I don’t mean this as a tangent to the posts I’ve read in the thread, but I think 2 Cor 5:10 speaks to both the accusers and the accused, both the guilty and the innocent.

10 For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may be recompensed for his deeds in the body, according to what he has done, whether good or bad.

From the catechism: 1039 In the presence of Christ, who is Truth itself, the truth of each man’s relationship with God will be laid bare. [[624]]The Last Judgment will reveal even to its furthest consequences the good each person has done or failed to do during his earthly life:

 

[pnewton]

So victims should come forward only if their’s is an air tight case with irrefutable evidence, several witnesses, and video of the assault, and a taped confession?

How about we just use the same requirement for guilt that we do other crimes, which is beyond reasonable doubt? For prison, I still hold to the adage that it is better that ten guilty men go free than one innocent prison. We must have a high standard of guilty, and there most be some physical evidence.

 

[poche]

Many times it is not that the crimes never happened, it is that there was a mistaken identification.

 

[JimG]

Many times it is not that the crimes never happened, it is that there was a mistaken identification.

This is quite true, but Dorothy Rabinowitz’s book is about crimes which never happened, were fabricated by ‘experts’ and prosecutors, but for which people were convicted and sent to prison. Not saying that prosecutors may not have in some cases believed that crimes occurred; maybe they did. First they convinced themselves, then they convinced others, never paying attention to the fact that the evidence alleged was totally incredible.